Saturday, June 18, 2016

If you enjoy reading this then you might like to check out past and present issues of the online magazine where I have a regular column.http://goodteacher.co.nz/

Differentiation is becoming a natural
part of a teacher’s work because technology is forcing us to personalise
learning for the students in our care. We need to be able to draw on a range of
strategies and methods and to adapt them as needed to help able students to
harness the learning power of their brains.
Knowing about the way that the brain controls what information it takes
in helps us to find effective ways to help all students to learn. Let’s start
with a little revision to remind ourselves.

Students learn-

·when
they are in a positive emotional state and are able to focus on the task at hand

·when
they are actively involved in the learning

·when
the learning is important to them

·when
they have the necessary skill strategies for dealing with the intellectual
challenge

·when
the teacher understands and supports high order thinking processes

Teachers are more effective if the
learning is co-constructed and current findings from neuroscience are helping
us to understand how building a knowledge of how the brain works helps teachers
and students to become more effective.

Neuroscience findings.

Learning depends on understanding.
Before you can understand a concept or a fact you have to remember it. Sensory information enters the brain through the
sensory nerves… eyes, ears, mouth, skin, muscles, feelings and emotions. These
nerve endings meet at the top of the brain stem at the back of the brain and
like a spam filter, the information is transmitted via emotions to either the thinking
prefrontal cortex where it is stored as working memory and understood, or consigned to the reactive automatic brain, concerned with survival, and filtered
out. Just like computers, some brains have more RAM space available than others
because the mental inbox is not cluttered with junk mail (irrelevant
information). What is happening in the learner’s life has an impact on how new
information is dealt with. (Missing breakfast and being hungry/ arriving late and disorganised/ having a
deadline to deal with and so on may well result in the information being filtered
and re-routed).

You have to understand new information before you can apply it. The hippocampus in the brain links the new information to
the knowledge that is already stored in the long term memory (any prior
knowledge that you may have relating to the information) and sends the new
links to the prefrontal cortex so that higher order thinking processes can
occur. Once you have applied it then you are in a position to analyse and evaluate. When the learning
process is enjoyable then the message travels from neuron to neuron as
electrical currents via the chemical process of dopamine, creating new links
between the gaps in the neurons, helping the brain to process the new
information. If this all sounds vaguely familiar, then that’s because it IS. Each layer of Bloom’s taxonomy builds on the
previous level. The creative process incorporates these elements naturally, and
that’s the way our brain works.

Based on this understanding of how
the brain learns new information, there are two aspects that I would like to
address. Firstly…techniques for teaching at a rate that is suited to the rapid
pace of many students within the strictures of the regular classroom, and
secondly… looking for ways to support authenticity and relevance.

Do you know what your students wonder about?

Consider creating a wonder wall of
questions on cards with velcro spots or bluetac to attach them. Visit these on
a regular basis and talk about the question types that are there and discuss
ways that they might be grouped and categorised. Your students will be able to
think of lots of ways to address this. Initially there will be a large number
of lower order questions and I have found it useful to have a couple of ‘what
if’ questions to add to move student thinking up a notch. A favourite of ours
is ‘able to be googled’ and ‘not able to be googled’ for the answer. We discuss
fat questions with a range of possible answers as opposed to skinny questions
with single responses too. Students quickly
catch on to the idea that higher order thinking questions are difficult to
google for answers and enjoy adding these to the wonder wall. If you are
teaching juniors then teach the difference between a statement and a question,
and become used to rephrasing student statements into questions for them to
think about. A good game to play in pairs is where one person picks up an
object and shares a fact about it from observation or experience. The other
asks a question about it. Next time, swap roles. Daily practice at this will
help students to see the differences and encourage them to ask more searching
questions.

Do you know what your students are interested in?

If you create opportunities for
students to ask questions about the things that they wonder about then it is
easier to notice things that they are interested in and to tie this interest
into your key earning focus. You can use the wonder wall to identify themes
that the students are interested in, or you can start with a theme and work
backwards to identify the student questions that relate to it.

How can you find out what the students know about the topic already?

Brainstorming, KWL charts and Pre-
tests are three traditional ways, but let’s deviate from the same old, same old
for a change.

Wonderings

Ask the students to come up with some
interesting questions that they might have about the topic. Students work in
small groups to come up with as many questions as they can think of without
editing as they go. The goal is quantity.

Write each question on a sheet of
paper. Remind the students that they are not expected to know the answer. At a
given signal, pass all papers to the left. Next person reads the questions
written there by the neighbour and adds more of their own BUT they can’t repeat
any they have already used.

Repeat several times. List the
questions asked. Share the information. Ask students to identify what they don’t know already and want to find
out. Have one or two ‘big’ questions of your own to offer if necessary. E.g.
How does … affect… and what could you do about it?

Snowballing

Students spend time individually
reflecting on the topic then pair up and share reflections. Pairs then form
into quartets, Quartets into octets and so on and so on. This is an alternative
way to move from small group to whole class discussion.

Conversation Doughnuts.

Students are numbered off. One or
two. All the number ones make a circle. All number twos go to stand behind a
number one. If the number of students is uneven then the teacher joins in as a
number two. Inner circle turns to face
the outer circle and talks about what they know already about the topic. At a
signal the outer circle moves two places to the left and starts a new
conversation. (two places are better than one because it lessens the chance
that next door neighbours were listening to each other’s conversations instead
of focusing on their partners)

Conversation moves for group work

Have a set of cards with conversation
prompts on them for each group. Participants choose one of the cards at random.
The conversation continues based on the comment card that the group members
hold.

Examples of specific comment moves:

·Make
a statement about the topic to open the discussion

·Ask
a question that shows you are interested in someone else’s comments

·Underscore
a link between two previous contributions

·Build
on something someone else has said

·Summarise
what has been said already

·Disagree
with someone in a respectful way

·Give
some evidence to back up something that has been said

·Give
your opinion about something that has been said

Picture concept links

Display a collection or group of
pictures and ask…

In what ways might these pictures/
objects all link up to each other?

How might all these things link to
the concept of … (the proposed topic )

How many different ways can you find
to link these pictures together?

The only rule is that ALL the items/
pictures have to fit within your category. (an ‘odd one out’ is not
acceptable). It can be as simple as all
the group begins with the same letter of the alphabet, or a more complicated link
such as all the items relate to a particular culture / theme etc. It is up to
the student to be able to justify how the things ‘fit’ within the category
selected. The more links the better so don’t strive for a ‘correct’ answer. You
may be surprised at the links that your able students make that you hadn’t even
thought of if you allow time for this to happen.. If you give in to the temptation of sharing
the link that you devised in the first place, then it will stop the hunt for
new links. (I generally give students a week for this exercise before
debriefing, and list the student suggestions as the week progresses so that we
can see progress from simple links to more complicated ones).

Negotiating student product

If …… was the answer, what are the
three interesting questions you can think of?

It is the student’s job to select a
question that

·sparks
their interest

·will
increase their understanding about the topic

·leads
to other questions to pursue

·provides
an opportunity to observe, experiment, analyse, create and reflect

BUT I believe it is the teacher’s job
to help the student to find interesting ways to do this and to ensure that
he/she has the necessary skills so that there is choice and challenge in the
task and the student is able to maximise the learning.

What if the kids are stuck?

Neuroscience findings support an
increase in learning when there is a feeling of personal accomplishment.
Creativity will be increased if the students are able to use their personal
strengths, but giving gifted students the opportunity to follow their own
passions and interests can result in the need to be build a network of experts
to go to when faced with a problem that is beyond the ability of the teacher.
Universities may be able to help with questions relating to specific
disciplines as they publish guides of their faculty members (online or hard
copy) for those connected with the media to be able to contact for comment when
necessary. This can be worth making an approach.

Failing that…

What do others think?

Could the question be approached from
another perspective/ point of view?

Could it be reworded?

How would an expert in … approach
this?

Do we have the necessary skills/
equipment/ resources to pursue this further?

Could we use social networking to
help with this question?

Do we need more opportunity to
observe, experiment, analyse, and create or is it time to reflect on the
learning that has taken place and move on?

Assessing Product

Encourage able students to create
learning maps. These reflections on the personal learning journey recorded as a
road map or a treasure map are useful as a regular reflection on progress
towards a learning goal. Experts in their field are often able to identify the
obstacles and barriers that they have encountered and think about how these
have contributed to where they are now.

Ask…How would a person working in
this field view this work? Where to from here?

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

The recent
tragedy at Cincinnati zoo has prompted an outpouring of social media response
that saddens me. The human tendency to point the finger of blame, and indulge
in witch hunting made me squirm. Those
who do not respond to situations in a judgmental way, and are willing to make
decisions based on a limited range of facts while not having the luxury of a wait
and see approach are in a minority.

Blame the zoo.

Blame the
parents.

Tranquillize
the gorilla.

Review the
gorilla’s actions over and over again through the camera lens.

It is a
brave person indeed who is able to quickly assess the options in a way that challenges
mob justice. The decision to end the life of a critically endangered animal in
order to save one of our own species is one that most of us hope that we never
would have to make. It is a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Anthropomorphism
of animal behaviour is an instinctive human reaction but it is dangerous.
Arguments that the silverback gorilla, Harambe, was acting in a protective way
when he held the child’s hand prompt the question if he was being protective,
then what was he protecting the child from? All of the female gorillas had
already responded to their keepers’ safety procedures and left the scene. In
the wild, infanticide by male gorillas is not uncommon behaviour. Harambe’s intent is unknown to us. He is a
different species.

Is it time
to move the focus on to the panoramic view and think about the broader issue of
why are zoos necessary? And if they are, then what needs to be done to
encourage compassion, tolerance and co-operation to result in a world where we
all work together for mutual benefit?

Our gifted
students deserve to be given time to discuss and reflect on issues such as this
because the future of many species depends on it. AND as Stephanie Tolan so eloquently put it … ‘It's a tough time to raise, teach or be a
highly gifted child... Schools are to extraordinarily intelligent children what
zoos are to endangered species (cheetahs in her analogy) ... Every organism has
an internal drive to fulfil its biological design. The same is true for
unusually bright children. From time to time the bars need be removed, the
enclosures broadened. Zoo Chow, easy and cheap as it is, must give way, at
least some of the time, to lively, challenging mental prey. – Stephanie Tolan,Is It A Cheetah?’

Is it time
to embrace the way that technology is able to change the face of traditional
schooling for our gifted students and admit that we are being given a wonderful
opportunity for them to interact with others of high ability so that their
decisions are better informed? It is certainly possible today. Perhaps it is
time for schools to foster ways in which we can create positive relationships
between communities to expand on ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and to
realise that for our highly able children the links are not necessarily right
on the doorstep.

On the side
of caution however, the speed at which
we are able to communicate on a global basis contributes to the ways that
people think about things in both positive and negative ways. Everyone seems to
carry a camera. A snapshot in time is still just that. A brief and limited view
of a particular time and place. Are we missing other important cues these days
by our current love affair with the camera lens?

Is our view
of the world being limited by our ability to filter and edit out what we don’t
want to think about?

Harambe’s
death has provoked far more questions than answers. Maybe that is the legacy
that we are left with. What do you think?

Saturday, June 4, 2016

Belonging
is a circle that embraces everything, but what does it mean to belong? What are
the signs that help us to know that we belong somewhere or tell us clearly that
we don’t belong? As a recently retired
educationalist, I have been reflecting on the ‘me’ behind the mask of my chosen
work life and the opportunities that stretch out in front of me for giving back
to the communities in which I live. I am different. I know I am. I just don’t
know if others will understand my need to follow my passion for making a
difference now that I am not officially employed. I live in hope that I can use
my life experiences to make a small positive contribution to the status quo
that will enhance the lives of my grandchildren.

The school experience focuses on encouraging us to
fit in. Students, new teachers, experienced teachers, administrative staff,
support staff. We all have our place in the communication network that is
education. I have always found this challenging. We slot together like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle but increasingly I am aware that there are those who seek positive
change and it is people such as these that I gravitate towards because I feel a
kindred spirit and a sense of ‘belonging’ rather than just fitting in. Some of
these spirits are young students and I am encouraged by the thought that they
will make a real difference to the future.

My current project, along with a colleague, is that
of putting together a collection of stories written by gifted entrepreneurial
students who have seen a community need and seized the opportunity to do
something about it. We have chosen to focus on students rather than adults to
showcase some of the ways in which gifted students have made a positive difference
to the lives of others. Their stories are true. Their passions are evident and
real. Opportunities abound and are just waiting to be recognised. So far we have several contributions in the
pipeline but the book has some way to go and I would really appreciate some
help in getting the word out to young people who may be interested in
contributing. I believe that we can
learn a lot from the group that makes us feel as though we really belong and
contribute positively to our feeling on personal worth, and we learn from
others. The book is a ‘give back’ to the N.Z. community in that ALL profits
will be donated to the Starship Foundation with its focus on the welfare of
children. Copyright for individual stories remains with the authors who will
receive a free copy if selected for publication.

One of the disadvantages of getting older is that our
links with the community gradually shrink. My network of like-minded people was
never wide to begin with. The mask of an extrovert doesn’t fit comfortably for
me. I am an introvert inside, sharing my passion with those who do not sit in
judgment. Your help would be appreciated. If you know of a student who might be
interested in participating and belonging to a group of like-minded individuals
determined to make a positive difference, please pass on the message. A sense
of belonging comes from being appreciated, understood and fitting in, but
fitting in and belonging are not the same thing. Stories can be dictated to and written up by
an adult if preferred. There are no word limits but work will be subject to
editing if necessary. Our hope is for the work to be ready for publication
later this year.